On a cold morning at the beginning of March, the Warsaw District Court was ready to hear the case against Otto Brack, a former colonel in the communist Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa. The sun had risen to poke holes in a grey blanket of cloud. Faint rain spat upon the streets and the crowd of onlookers and restive journalists. On the other side of the road stood an elderly couple, a man and woman. They seemed to be making a separate, private protest. Between them they held a banner made from a torn bed sheet.
‘Czekamy na sprwiedliwosca,’ murmured Roza, reading the black lettering, as the limousine swung to a halt at the main entrance. She turned to Anselm with a quiet translation: ‘We are waiting for justice.’
Guided by hulking policemen in baseball caps and black body armour, Anselm followed Roza, John and Celina out of the car towards the court, mouthing the phrase as if it were sacred, ducking past the nest of microphones, the flash of cameras and the volley of questions.
‘We are waiting for justice,’ he mumbled, in reply.
Roza’s expectation that Anselm would understand nothing had been defeated by the simple expedient of simultaneous translation delivered through a discreet earpiece. Upon arrival he was brought by a court usher to a tiny room with a window and an elevated view on to the court. The cabin was sufficiently high that no one would notice it unless they raised their heads to examine the plaster mouldings or the flamboyant capitals crowning the sequence of pillars that stood like guards around the auditorium. Anselm had a bird’s eye view, with the implied detachment that comes with distance. Once he was seated at a narrow table, the translator’s voice sounded in his ear, greeting him with flawless English.
‘Let me introduce the lawyers down below’
The courtroom was wood-panelled from floor to ceiling. Three robed judges sat beneath the emblem of a white eagle. Documents lay in bundles between the computer screens. The IPN prosecutors were crouched to one side, their black gowns trimmed with red:
Sebastian a kind of map-reader to the driver, Madam Czerny a woman with bleached straggling hair and a pair of gold bifocals held permanently in one hand. Fastened just below their left shoulders was a plume of crimson cloth the size of a handkerchief. Anselm couldn’t help but think of blood. Facing them sat Mr Fischer, counsel appointed for Brack, the sober green border to his gown completely displaced by the pink and blue striped cuffs of his shirt. One could almost pass over the client at his side. He’d been upstaged by the few centimetres of peeping colour.
Anselm examined Brack. First with a lawyer’s eye: aged eightyfour, he faced what the indictment called Communist crimes — a misnomer because murder and torture had a prevalence and character without boundary of any kind — and then, briefly with a monk’s:
Do you realise what you’re doing?
He wore a light brown jacket and a dark brown shirt. His tie was another brown. Against those combinations, even his skin seemed brown. Dark pigmentations like the spots on a Dalmatian covered his head. Large glasses with brownish lenses hid his face. He was thin, like a wooden clothes stand. All the emotion centred on the mouth. It worked as if he were chewing a piece of old leather, the top teeth occasionally pulling at the bottom lip. He ignored every whispered remark from his counsel. In front of him was a smart-looking black leather document case.
Is this truly your choice?
The witness stand was directly in front of the judicial bench. It resembled a lectern, inherently serious. Roza would stand there and tell her story. Then Brack would do the same thing. A year earlier, at the other end of the phone, Sebastian had listened to Anselm, clicking his biro open and shut.
‘He’ll tell the court how Pavel Mojeska betrayed his wife, his friends and his country. If he wants, he can make it up as he goes along, because no one else was there. He’s going to spring a defence out of the files. He’ll produce evidence that Pavel collaborated with the Nazis — a crime the IPN would prosecute now, if he was living. He’ll make those executions into rough justice — unpleasant, brutal, and lacking ceremony… but legitimate actions of the State nonetheless. Brack’s not going down, Sebastian, he doesn’t play to lose; he never has done.’
Sebastian’s pen had clattered against a wall.
‘What have I done?’ he’d said, faintly ‘I’ve brought her to this.’
‘What have we all done?’ Anselm had replied.
Drawing that thick long line between ‘then’ and ‘now’ had never seemed more prudent. Shortly after that telephone conversation Sebastian had carefully explained to Roza what was likely to happen when Brack opened his mouth, and she’d listened with that disconcerting quietness that absorbed any and all disappointment. When he’d finished, she’d simply said, ‘At least I didn’t remain quiet.’
She was now sitting with John and Celina in a room set aside for prosecution witnesses. She was wearing a sober dress from Jaeger with a silvery Paisley design. The lime cardigan — an old friend, worn at the elbows — appeared, by association, both refined and expensive. Sebastian was right, though: she’d aged. She’d taken in too much. Her movements were slow and heavy, her spine rounded. But she had a most haunting allure, a curious effect of soft skin and eyes that Anselm couldn’t meet for long without turning away Inexplicably they’d remained vulnerable.
Looking down through the window, Anselm scanned the court as if there might be any familiar faces, not expecting to find any But he did. He found one. And it wasn’t Bernard Kolba’s. They’d already met in the corridor (he was there representing the family; his parents couldn’t face the strain). Anselm’s eyes had alighted upon a fine bone structure, frizzy greying hair and round glasses. Irina Orlosky was in the public gallery, her dark, shapeless coat held tight by folded arms. Her eyes were on Brack, the man whose life she’d saved.
Once the jury were installed Madam Czerny came to her feet. Her voice had alarming, deep cadences, the translation in Anselm’s ear skilfully matching tone with content, keeping a sort of distance from the primary speaker. Somehow, the prosecutor was addressing Anselm without intermediary. Throughout, her right hand held the bifocals, elegantly as if it were a glass of Muscat.
‘This case concerns the Terror,’ she said, deadly gentle. ‘The time of denunciation and disappearing, of imprisonment upon a whim, of routine violence, pathological suspicion, false accusations and forced recantations. The epoch of complicity. The age of exile and executions, co-ordinated to secure the imposition of Soviet socialist realism.’ Madam Czerny’s gaze moved around, indomitable. ‘Roza Mojeska is one ordinary woman who, despite the overwhelming presence of fear and the crushing pressure to conform, said, “No”. As a consequence she was brutally tortured. Pavel Mojeska, her husband, also said, “No”. He was brutally murdered. They’d said the one word that millions dared not speak. They’d brought a free word to Warsaw’ She seemed to have finished but then, confiding and soft spoken, she made a reluctant declaration. ‘The accused, Otto Brack, said, “Yes”. He got up every morning, looked in the mirror and said “Yes”. No one twisted his arm. He made his own free choice. And it is this profound affirmation of terror — its implementation and consequences — that now falls to be judged.’
To that end the prosecution would call evidence from experts to present the context within which the alleged crimes took place. An historian would describe the architecture of Stalinism in general and the Terror in particular; another would explain the organisation, powers and objectives of the secret police; yet another would outline the crucial importance of underground printing as a means of preserving an independent culture. The line of attack was clear:
Madam Czerny would lead the court down to the foundations of a forgotten time, that it might better understand Brack’s place in the cellar.
Then it would be Roza’s turn.
‘She will be on her own, as she was, once, long ago,’ said Madam Czerny ‘There is no other living witness to what took place in that prison. She will tell you what she saw’
After lunch on the second day of evidence, Anselm sent a message to the translator: owing to a previous engagement, he wouldn’t be attending the hearing that afternoon — apologies for having forgotten to mention it sooner. In fact it was a spontaneous decision. He’d been listening, hour after hour, tormented by the sight of Brack’s leather document case; he’d fidgeted constantly watching Brack make rushed notes while a professor from Krakow mocked, with scholarly detachment, the acclamation of Stalin as a ‘Philologist of Genius’ and the ‘Greatest Man of All Times’ (two of 300 unctuous tributes that had appeared in the national press in 1949 to mark his seventieth birthday); he’d been troubled by the growing certainty that even the prosecutor’s evidence formed part of Brack’s final scheme to escape the power of a rightly constituted court.
Outside, away from the growing tension, Anselm went to a fishmonger’s and bought a fresh oyster.